I’ve been looking for a webseries for about a week now, and while it’s hardly the longest time I’ve spent in search of lost media (looking at you, badly-dubbed-in-Russian copy of Annihilation: Earth) it’s quickly shaping up to be one of the most bizarre.

The name of the webseries is Divergence, and no: as far as I can tell it has no relation to the popular book and film series Divergent.

It is also science fiction, but that seems to be where the similarities end as far as I can tell. I was turned onto this series because cool actor Dan Southworth plays a lead role in it. For anyone who doesn’t already know me reading this, I follow Dan Southworth’s career because of his role as this embodiment of following:

Divergence looks like it’s worth a watch, so I looked it up. Finding an interview with Mr. Southworth and Mr. Horn, the two minds behind the series, I’m led to the channel Divergence was posted to. Unfortunately, it only has three videos, only one of which is an actual episode of the webseries: the rest are unavailable. It seems as if it was not terribly popular, so there aren’t any reuploads of it. No matter, this barely counted as a search. I visited the Facebook page of the webseries, using uBlock and zooming out so I can read the page without giving the Zuck any more than he’s already surreptitiously taken from me.

Reading the blurry, zoomed-out text told me that Divergence was moved from YouTube to “ReelHouse” as a way to better enable profiting from the production. Now I’m not against paying for good (or Southworth-related) media, and I figured the webseries couldn’t cost more than ten dollars or so. Twenty, tops. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the chance. After tracking down which ReelHouse is correct (there’s a movie theater and demo reel production company that may mislead seekers) I discovered the website is also defunct. Attempting to visit the official Divergence website at this point returned nothing; utilizing the Internet Archive I was able to discover that at some point whatisdivergence.com was used as an electronics support blog before closing down entirely.

My confusion grew, and my interest roused further. Investigation into the fate of reelhouse.org led me to a UK rock climbing forum, ukclimbing.com. Here a single five-post thread asking about the fate of ReelHouse enlightened me on its fate: it moved to projektor.com. Alas, searching that (mercifully still active) site turned nothing up about my goal, although it does seem to be a trove of student projects and independent film projects worth browsing through.

At this point I’ve learned that this webseries has left YouTube over a decade ago, left its now-defunct personal site, left the site it was moved to because that site became defunct…it’s seeming rather hopeless. Yet, I’ve still faced worse odds searching: after years of periodic digging I finally discovered a fan-made music video of TOOL’s ‘Lateralus’ on an Iranian social media website. If this scene looks familiar, hit me up: I back that shit up now.

I already knew about Dan Southworth’s career, but not the other head behind Divergence: Douglas Horn. I looked him up and find that he has a LinkedIn—a good sign! It’s still up, and…he is now CEO at a blockchain-driven web storage company? I think? It seems shortly after Divergence was released, several years to be exact he got into the discount data storage business.

Usually it’s the opposite. I reached out to Mr. Horn via his company’s contact page, and in response received what read like a ChatGPT-generated reply telling me about the company. Feeling that was a dead end, I resolved to sleep and try again tomorrow. Tomorrow is now today, and I have a new piece of media on the list: Looking For Bruce, a 1996 movie that’s notable for being Dan Southworth’s first credited role. It’s not related to fellow Bruce-themed 1996 movie The Bruce featuring all the inaccuracies of Braveheart with none of the redeeming qualities, save for renowned actor BRIAN BLESSED.

Searches like these take time, but I have other avenues to pursue: I still haven’t even contacted my associates at the Siberian torrent site where I found Annihilation: Earth, or reached out to Mr. Southworth directly. Somewhere, maybe on an old flash drive buried under an old Greatest Polka Hits record or forgotten underwear, somewhere rests a copy of this series. I will find it.